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September/October 2012 Lite Challenge: Village of Taffarel

Started messing with an idea this morning...not sure if I will continue with this for the challenge or go with something else.

One of the PCs in my game has contracted Lycanthropy and wishes to get cured. Doing so requires that she kill source of her particular bloodline (among other things). My plan was to map the village were this progenitor is located. The "Secret" in this story is two-fold. (1) No one in the village itself or the surrounding area knows that a pack of were-hyenas (it is Al-Qadim after all) has taken up residence in the Manor overlooking the village. (2) This pack is cooperating with the Drow and protecting a secret entrance to the Underdark beneath the Manor house.

I like the story and basic outline of the map thus far...but I'm not sure how/if I can depict a "secret" within the map. I was thinking that maybe I would create two maps (similar to last month's challenge) where one shows the village and the other provides a close up view of the entrance/path to the Underdark. Alternatively, maybe I can do two maps with the second depicting the tunnels that run beneath the village while making the houses/roads/geography transparent.

looking good...one thing though, watch out for the shadows on the buildings. You are missing the shadows for the walls, without which it makes the buildings look "table like", if you understand what I mean.

Art Critic = Someone with the Eye of an Artist, Words of a Bard, and the Talent of a Rock.

Made some edits...mostly to the landscape (playing with shadows). Reasonably happy with the temple in the NW..the building in the NE is basically a placeholder at this point. Struggling to get the buildings to match what I have in my head.

### LATEST WIP ###

***edit...seem to be losing detail in the mountains (my peaks are gone) in the conversion from psd to jpeg - probably going to have to reduce the image size to fix - i'll do that for the next update.

Redid my "manor" complex in the NE. Next step is to add lots of little village houses (probably in the same building style as the manor). Shrunk the image size down a bit to try to get a better export, but I think i'll have to tinker with it some more since I'm still losing some of the detail on the mountain part.

My personal goal with this challenge was to improve on how I illustrate arabian-style housing (since i'm currently DMing in Al-Qadim). I wasn't entirely happy with how I did it last month - and was kind of at a loss for how to achieve the effect I had in my head. After seeing TheHorseWhisper's recent post I gave it another go and this is the result. Still not completely satisfied, but I think its something to work with.

Thanks. My current plan is to present a map of the Temple along the side of this main village map to illustrate the secret entrance to the Underdark. At the moment, I was thinking about doing 2 or 3 levels (main floor, basement/underdark, and possibly the 2nd floor). Not sure if i'll get all that done (especially since I still have quite a bit of stuff to do with the village map) or if the final presentation will be too busy...but, here's what i have for the temple so far. It was made with CC3 and all of the textures are mods of stuff grabbed from CGtextures. The objects were grabbed from the Dunjinni Forums